It starts with a flash in mind. Shortly, a steady rumble can felt at the bottom of your gut. Before you know it, all you can think about is food.
Scientists call it borborygmi. Sounding deceivingly like some wrapped Korean delicacy, the term simply means hunger pangs.
For me, it usually occurs importunately when I am in the middle of preparing a presentation or reviewing some work or meeting some important people. Worst still if it happens in the middle of a serious argument. Then I am hungry and angry. You won’t like me when I’m hangry.
Luckily, I’m not a picky eater. I am, however, good friends with some people who are.
These friends (who shall not be named ), when asked what they want to eat, will usually say with complete sincerity: “Anything-lah. Cincai.”
They are not cincai.
My suggestions would be confronted with “no, don’t like that,” or “I just had that yesterday,” or “hmm…don’t feel like it,”
Here’s where my engineering brain breaks down. I was trained to think in systems: defined inputs, processed through logic, producing reliable outputs. “Anything” is a wildcard. In computer terms, a wildcard means literally anything is valid. So when the input to the function what_to_eat() is a wildcard, the valid output is any random selection from the entire universe of edible food.
The correct input, technically, is for them to define their exception parameters upfront. Something like: “Anything except fast food, Char Koay Teow from that uncle in the singlet at the food court, Korean fried chicken unless there’s a Taeyang promotion, Indian food unless it’s the aloo puri from the Aunty who only makes them on Wednesdays…”
But they rarely give any exceptions.
So now I maintain a mental database. A dynamic, self-updating exception list, cross-referenced against their mood, the weather, what they ate in the last 72 hours and whether Mercury is in retrograde. I run the query in the background, return a list of suggestions (with high confidence of acceptance) and present them one-at-a-time.
They usually say yes after option three or four. Anything after option five means I will be going to eat by myself while they ponder further by themselves. However, once I am properly fed, all those little quirks don’t matter so much.
Friends are like that. Slightly unpredictable inputs, occasionally inefficient processes but always worth keeping in my system.